As with every month, Iran Human Rights Monitor has created a detailed report on Iran’s human rights abuses and we will summarise it. The issues discussed involve the coronavirus pandemic, the overreach of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), terrorizing the public, executions, torture, persecution of religious minorities, and suppression of the Iranian people.
Given that anti-regime protests have sprung up across the country in spite of the pandemic, the mullahs are trying every method possible to keep people off the streets, from installing IRGC Bassij hit squads in almost all neighborhoods to frightening people by executing or torturing political prisoners to seemingly deliberately mismanaging the coronavirus.
In September alone, at least 21 people were executed, including:
- protester and wrestler Navid Afkari, who was the subject of an international campaign to save his life when he was suddenly executed, prompting suggestions that he died under torture
- juvenile offender Mo’ayyed Savari, who was arrested and charged at age 17
- Mo’in Salavarzi Zadeh, 55, whose sentence has not been upheld for the past 29 years before suddenly the Supreme Court ruled on September 7, without the presence of Salavarzi Zadeh or his lawyer
The regime also ordered the barbaric sentence of finger amputation for four men – Hadi Rostami, Mehdi Sharfian, Mehdi Shahivand, and Kasra Karami – who had been forced to confess under torture. In protest to the initial sentence in June, Rostami cut his wrists.
Seven Iranians Sentenced to Amputations and Flogging for Theft
The persecution of religious minorities continued, with at least three cases of Sunni citizens and clerics being arrested and interrogated merely for practicing their faith, as well as 35 Baha’is, and six Christian converts.
In related news, the regime took two-year-old Lydia away from her adoptive parents, Maryam Falahi and Sam Khosravi, who she has been with since she was three months old because they are Christians and her biological parents were Muslim. This is despite the fact that Lydia has heath problems that mean she is unlikely to be adopted again.
In other criminal acts, the regime is also seeking to terrify the people into submission by parading dissidents through the streets. They’ve also ordered that evacuation of six border villages in Kurdistan province with no plan to help the people avoid homelessness, opened fire on citizens in Likak after they objected to the beating of a driver, and summoned 15 Bu-Ali university students over protests held last year.
The regime should know that people are much less scared than the regime’s forces because people have nothing to lose.
Hossein Zolfaqari, the Interior Ministry’s deputy for security and order, said that calls for the protest had increased three-fold on the previous year.
He said: “There were 519 calls for protest in the first five months of the previous year, while in the same period this year, there have been 1,702 calls which is a 227 percent increase.”
